Strategic tools for the practising manager

KIT

The total value of the bags market in urban India is estimated at Rs 1,470 crore a year.

The market for ladies handbags/purses in India is 39.7 per cent of the total bags market and is valued at Rs 585 crore.

The total volume of the ladies handbags/purses market in urban India is estimated at 0.63 crore units a year, which is 46 per cent of the total market for bags in terms of volume.

On an average, men spend Rs 750 per unit while buying handbags for ladies, but when women shop for them, they tend to spend a lesser amount, that is, Rs 565. Most consumers prefer buying ladies handbags from exclusive branded outlets (28 per cent) or department stores (24 per cent). Forty-five per cent consumers prefer to shop for them at malls.

*15-25 years (SEC A & B of urban population) in India

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

Multiplayer online role-playing games are sprawling cybercommunities that offer a sneak preview of tomorrow's business environment. Players who lead teams in these online worlds hone the skills that they will need as business leaders in the future. Games also provide an environment that makes being an effective leader easier and that today's businesses might try to replicate selectively in their own organisations.

Those are the principal findings by Reeves, of Stanford University; Malone, of MIT's Sloan School; and O'Driscoll, of North Carolina State. As part of an analysis conducted by Seriosity, a company that develops game-inspired enterprise software, the authors studied people who headed up teams in online games. They also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM.

The authors identified three distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that, as workplaces and the overall business climate become more dynamic and gamelike, will be essential for tomorrow's leaders: speed, risk taking, and acceptance of leadership roles as temporary. The most important finding, say the authors, is that getting the leadership environment right can be as important as choosing the right leader.

Leadership's online labs
By Byron Reeves, Thomas W Malone and Tony O'Driscoll
Harvard Business Review, May 2008
Read this article at www.hbr.com

Many executives spend too much time and energy communicating with investors they could easily ignore. The most important investors ground their investment decisions in a deep understanding of a company and its strategy, believe that it can create long-term value, and are more likely than other investors to support management through periods of short-term volatility.

A better understanding of the investors' strategy helps a company to focus its messages on its most important investors, to interpret feedback from all investors in the right context, and to control the amount of time it devotes to investor relations activities.

Communicating with the right investors
The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008
Subscribe to this article at www.mckinseyquarterly.com

In the heat of competition, executives can easily become obsessed with beating their rivals.

This adrenaline-fueled emotional state, which the authors call competitive arousal, often leads to bad decisions. Managers can minimise the potential for competitive arousal and the harm it can inflict by avoiding certain types of interaction and targeting the causes of a win-at-all-costs approach to decision making.

Through an examination of companies such as Boston Scientific and Paramount, and through research on auctions, the authors identified three principal drivers of competitive arousal: intense rivalry, especially in the form of one-on-one competitions; time pressure, found in auctions and other bidding situations, for example; and being in the spotlight